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Media
Guardian | Special
report: Iraq - the media war
I was only asking
We had reached the point where reporters were interviewing other
reporters in the most media scrutinised war ever fought. But even among
the over-exposed, I was - because of the irritable question I'd asked at a
daily briefing and over international television - on the verge of a
special status: becoming the wise-ass of the war.
A television reporter from Istanbul was hotly pursuing me for an
interview because I was, apparently, famous in Turkey (a title for a
possible memoir). I was very popular, it seemed, in France, Canada, and
Italy too.
The AP, Reuters, the Times, and the Nation were calling. What's more,
I'd had to switch from the Doha Marriott to the Doha Ritz-Carlton for a
faster internet connection to download 3,000 hate emails.
I'd lobbed my big question because it just seemed too obvious not to
ask. Everybody here was having the same perfectly Groundhog Day
experience: you woke up only to repeat the day before, and, no matter what
you did or said or thought, you were helpless to effect a change in the
next day. So every day everybody asked the same questions about Basra and
the supply lines and the whereabouts of the WMDs and Saddam, and got the
same answers. They were war correspondents after all (or trying to be).
The purest form of reporting: armies were moved, weapons deployed, kill
counts tabulated. Nothing postmodern about a war reporter. Events needed
to be confirmed and recorded. But behind this stripped-down facade,
invisible to the public, was a secret, very pleasant theatre of the
absurd.
We were in on the joke. We were the high-school kids who got it. The
embedded reporters, on the other hand, were the rah rah jocks.
"General, is the war going well, or is the war going extremely well?"
was the question we all knew we were here to ask.
("In a world where people are being blown up, it is difficult to
explain that life at the Ritz is a kind of death too," said one of the
Aussie reporters, contemplating our predicament. "Death by buffet.")
General Vincent Brooks, who became the official spokesperson and the face
of Centcom, was surely the ultimate assistant principal.
Everybody here understood. A roll of the eye. A curl of the lip. A
silent scream. They were war reporters.
But I was not a war reporter. I did not have to observe war-time
propriety, or cool. I was free to ask publicly (on international
television, at that) the question everyone was asking of each other: "I
mean no disrespect, but what is the value proposition of these briefings.
Why are we here? Why should we stay? What's the value of what we're
learning at this million dollar press centre?"
It was the question to sour the dinner party. It was also, because I
used the words value proposition, a condescending and annoying question -
a provocation.
Still I meant it literally: other than the pretence of a news
conference - the news conference as backdrop and dateline - what did we
get for having come all this way? What information could we get here that
we could not have gotten in Washington or New York, what access to what
essential person was being proffered? And why was everything so bloodless?
My question, was met with a sudden, disruptive, even slightly anarchic,
round of applause - not dissimilar to the whoops when a kid drops a tray
in the school cafeteria - and I knew I was in a little trouble.
The question it turned out, spoke powerfully to people who think this
whole thing (not just the news conference, but, in some sense, the entire
war) is phony, a set-up, a fabrication, in which just about everything is
in service to unseen purposes and agendas (hence my popularity in Turkey,
France, Canada, and Italy, as well as among the reporters in the Doha
press pool). But it seemed to speak even more dramatically to people who
think the whole thing is real, pure, linear, uncomplicated, elemental. For
the former I'd addressed something like the existential issue of our own
purposelessness, but for the latter, I seem to have, heretically, raised
the very issue of meaning itself.
And, seriously compounding matters, there was the rude applause. It
must have seemed like media types were clapping their own smartness, or
smartassness. By acknowledging the uselessness of these ritualised
proceedings, and therefore, the artifice, we media people suddenly seemed
like a thing apart - apart from the war, and from our audience (and hence,
from our country too - at least we American media people).
Now, this is a complicated point because although everybody in the room
represented the media (and would, in short order, be recirculating the
noninformation and obvious disinformation that was given out), almost
everybody in the room saw the media as occurring somewhere else - a
confection being created by some unseen hand. Everybody here would step
out of the briefing room and look up at the monitors above the makeshift
newsroom tuned to the networks and news channels and watch the briefing be
reported to the world and share the same reaction: what bullshit.
But as it happens, incredibly, there are many people who believe that
these news briefings - which get surprisingly high ratings - are real.
That when people in uniform speak, they speak the truth. Really. Truly.
What is most surprising about this to me is not so much that there are
a lot of people who would mistake a news conference for an actual,
transparent, official giving of information, but that the Pentagon would
be media savvy enough to understand this (certainly, though, they were
smart enough to come up with the embed thing - wherein reporters became
soldiers and invaders and liberators).
And what's most pathetic is that we reporters could have been dumb
enough not to understand that this whole million-dollar business, the
plasma screens and such, were not for us, but directed over our heads
towards the US audience. When I challenged General Brooks, I was unaware
of what I was challenging. I only became aware of what I'd done when the
Rush Limbaugh thing happened. Now, General Brooks is a one star general -
hence, the further point of my question, which was about why we were
getting briefed by, in effect, middle-management. The point was to be
briefed by General Tommy Franks, the Centcom commander, like Norman
Schwarzkopf had briefed in Gulf I. To get one star when you were expecting
four, is something like getting an assistant undersecretary when you're
expecting the president.
Except that's not what it looked like on television. On television, I
would find out, Brooks looked fabulous. On the small screen, Brooks had
quiet authority, large sensitive eyes (in person his eyes seemed
hang-dog), and a reassuring unflappability (in the room, this seemed like
no more than inexpressiveness). On television, what you saw was not just a
general but, all the more heroic, a black general. My question, then, was
a challenge to a broad range of certainties. I was suggesting the whole
operation was bogus - so I was challenging reality itself. Then I was
challenging the ultimate authority - a general in war. This was
practically insubordination. And, in my bringing up the issue of rank, it
must have seemed that, displeased with the service, I was in some sense
asking to see the manager.
So the Rush thing. First it was CNN that replayed my question - the CNN
view was, more or less, the liberal media view: a certain hand wringing
about whether the media was being used. Then it was Fox, with its extreme,
love-it-or-leave-it, approach to the war, which took me apart: I was
clearly a potential traitor.
And then it was Rush.
To his audience of 20 million - pro-war, military minded,
Bush-centered, media-hating - lily white-Rush laid me out. I was not only
a reporter, but one from New York magazine. "New York" resonated. It
combined with "media" and suddenly, in the hands of Rush, I was as elitist
and as pampered (fortunately nobody mentioned the Ritz) and as dismissive
of the concerns of real Americans as, well, Rush's 20 million assume the
media to be. Whereas Rush, that noted foot soldier, represented the
military heartland.
What's more, according to Rush, that great defender of the rights of
African-Americans, I was a racist. Duh. A white liberal challenging a
black general. It's a binary world.
And Rush gave out my email address. Almost immediately, the 3,000
emails, full of righteous fury, started to come.
Which all, in some way, helps explain why we are in Iraq. Now, when you
suddenly get 3,000 emails excoriating you and your fealty, you can begin
to think that the media may in fact be a hostile, negative, unloved and
unwanted presence. (My al-Jazeera colleagues, singled out for showing
bloody pictures during war, certainly felt this, too.) But, of course, the
opposite is true - we are, even al-Jazeera, a vital, mostly cooperative,
part of the war effort. So when, in response to my question, General
Brooks said that I was here of my own volition and, if it wasn't
satisfactory to me, I should go home, this was far from a statement of
policy.
The last thing the Pentagon wanted was for the media to go home.
Indeed, Centcom refused to confirm or deny what everyone could see for
themselves: that chairs were being removed from the briefing every day (in
one day alone, six chairs were removed) so that, as numbers dwindled,
empty seats would not be shown to the world. This was a serious problem.
What if you gave a war and the media didn't come?
Clearly marked as the rabble-rouser of the get-out-of-Doha movement, I
was approached by some enforcer types. The first person was a version of a
Graham Greene character. He represented the White House, he said. Wasn't
of the military. Although, he said, he was embedded here ("sleeping with a
lot of flatulent officers," he said). He was incredibly conspiratorial.
Smooth but creepy: "If you had to write the memo about media relations,
what would be your bullet points?"
The next person to buttonhole me was the Centcom uber-civilian, a
thirty-ish Republican operative. He was more full-metal-jacket in his
approach (although he was a civilian he was, inexplicably, in uniform -
making him, I suppose a sort of para-military figure): "I have a brother
who is in a Hummer at the front, so don't talk to me about too much
fucking air-conditioning." And: "A lot of people don't like you." And
then: "Don't fuck with things you don't understand." And too: "This is
fucking war, asshole." And finally: "No more questions for you."
I had been warned.
I finally got to the x-ray machine on the way through the guard
house to my CNN interview. Lots of other reporters were arriving at this
early hour for their primetime spots. Every- body was making Doha jokes. I
was talking about my run-in with the scary White House guys. "You've met
the Hitler youth," said another reporter. Everybody laughed. This was
grim, but it was funny. The camaraderie of people who understood the joke
- who were part of the joke - was very reassuring and comfortable.
Certainly, there was the sense that this, however grim, was a
diversion. But, in isolated flashes, during a few moments of quiet on the
media bus navigating the security pylons, it was also hard not to
understand what Rush's people were saying in their violent and bilious
emails: I wasn't taking this seriously. None of us were. We were the
people with the picnic baskets coming out to see the battle of Bull Run.
And this wasn't just a diversion: it was just the beginning. I had been
warned.
Michael Wolff writes for New York magazine Printable version | Send it to a friend | Read it later | See saved stories Special report Iraq: latest news and analysis Chronology 14.04.2003: Timeline: day 26 of war The Informer Sign up for our free 2pm daily email briefing Key documents Full text of speeches and documents Interactive guides Click-through graphics on Iraq Audio reports Audio reports on Iraq More special reports Politics and the war Aid for Iraq Iraq - the media war The anti-war movement 28.01.2003: Guide to anti-war websites  |
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